The SIM tray does double duty as an SD card tray, odd since it requires you to remove your SIM to remove your SD card.

Andrew Cunningham

The US version of the tray only has one SIM slot, but there's a spot for another one that's used by international models.

Andrew Cunningham

Starting in late 2013 with the original Moto G, Motorola has been carving out a niche for itself as a company that offers good value for the money. It’s competing against companies like ZTE and Huawei and Xiaomi overseas, but especially here in the US it sells some of the best Android phones you can get for under $200. Motorola sells them with relatively clean, sensible loads of Android that are updated predictably, if not always promptly.

This year, the company is taking the same approach with its flagship phone. The new third-generation Moto X (also called the Moto X Pure Edition in the US, or the Moto X Style everywhere else) ticks all of the important boxes for an Android flagship but starts at £359, cheaper than the list prices for flagships from the likes of Samsung and LG. Cheaper than a Galaxy. More readily available than a OnePlus Two. The Moto X Pure Edition could be the best choice out there for people who want a flagship phone at a midrange price.

Look, feel, and screen

Motorola’s review program was actually pretty interesting this time around—the company gave out promo codes and then let us use Moto Maker to customize our own models. I chose a black front with a navy blue back and a nice bright red accent, which colors both the small cutout in the back of the phone and the speaker grills at the top and bottom.

As with the last two models and the third-gen Moto X, the ability to customize the style of the phone takes an otherwise straightforward design and gives it some much-needed personality. It fills a nice niche in the market, somewhere in between the pretty and well-built but sterile Galaxy S6 and iPhone 6 designs and the whole “concrete slab” thing the OnePlus Two has going on.

Like the third-generation Moto G, the standard “soft grip” back of the Moto X now has a slightly ribbed look and feel to it. That plus the rubberized texture Motorola is using for the back of the phone makes it easy to grip. The wood and leather finishes will obviously feel like, well, wood and leather, but those finishes add to the cost of the phone. I haven’t seen the new Moto X with either of these finishes firsthand, but I liked the leather finish from last year’s Moto X. The wood finish still shouts “mid-1980s Dodge Caravan” to me, but it obviously appeals to some people.

Customizing the Moto X in Moto Maker. First, you pick the color of the front and the metal trim.

Then you pick the back. There's nothing stopping you from putting together an ugly color combo, obviously.

There are several color options if you're getting the standard soft grip back.

There are four different wood options, all of which add $25 to the cost of the phone.

Same for leather.

Then you pick an accent color, which affects the strip on the back as well as the speaker grills.

The phone’s SIM tray is a neat touch that’s functionally a bit confusing. It’s a double-sided tray that holds a nano SIM card on one side (the US version only supports one SIM, but there’s a spot where a second one could clearly fit in the international versions) and a microSD card on the other. The odd part is that it means you need to remove your SIM any time you want to take out that SD card and swap it for another one, though, if you’re just using the card as a semi-permanent way to augment the internal storage, it won’t be a problem.

The second Moto X was bigger than the first one, but the third one is pretty firmly in the “phablet” category. Some phone buyers seem to think that bigger is better, and there’s certainly a market for phones this big (it’s smaller than the Nexus 6 by a shade, though that’s the phone it most resembles). But in two years this phone has gone from against-the-grain small and holdable to a standard five inches to Galaxy Note/iPhone 6S Plus huge.

The phone’s curves aren’t as gentle or as gradual as in the third-generation Moto G’s, either. The sides are harder and flatter, and the drop-off where the sides meet the back is harsher, too. The curved back still feels nice, but ultimately you end up noticing the size of the phone and those harsher edges more while you’re holding it.

Motorola does what it can to keep the phone’s size manageable by shaving off as much of the bezel around the screen as it can, particularly the ones to the left and right of the screen. The Moto X has never had thick bezels, but this year’s are even thinner than last year’s.

The screen itself looks excellent, though it’s a somewhat odd choice compared to past Motos X. The 5.7-inch screen is an IPS LCD panel rather than an AMOLED panel, which means that blacks aren’t as black but that whites lack the purple-green shimmer typical of AMOLED displays. Colours are good but less saturated—whether you view this as a pro or a con depends entirely on your preferences. IPS tends to be more accurate while AMOLED’s poppy colours often seem more eye-catching.

The reason past Motos X used AMOLED screens was to support the Moto Display feature. Moto Display uses basic white-on-black icons and text to show you when you’re getting notifications even when your phone is off. Since AMOLED panels only light up the pixels they need, Moto Display never needed to fire up the entire screen to show these notifications, saving energy in the process. Moto Display is still supported on the new Moto X, but it has to power up the whole screen to work, which may have an adverse effect on battery life over time.

The feature still works pretty much the same way. The screen pulses briefly when a new notification comes in, and you can make it come up by nudging the phone or by waving your hand in front of it so the IR sensors can see it. And you can disable it in favour of Google’s native Ambient Display mode, which matches the rest of the OS better but only illuminates the screen when a notification comes in, not when you bump or wave your hand over the phone.

Overall we still like the look and feel of the Moto X. Moto picked a basic design language and has stuck with it for a couple of years now, resulting in a lineup of phones that are all recognisable without being ostentatious, understated without being bland. Our main gripe is that the size has gone up so much, guaranteeing that some first- or even second-generation Moto X users looking to upgrade may find the phone too large for their tastes.

Selling direct to consumers and cutting the price

Further Reading

One big Moto X feature that has nothing to do with the phone: Motorola is eschewing the major US carriers this time around in favour of a direct sales model that puts unlocked, unsubsidised phones right into the hands of consumers, something that it's been doing with its phones in the UK and Europe for some time.

On the one hand, this model fits the current worldwide smartphone landscape better. The two-year smartphone contract that helped high-end smartphones like the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy S and Galaxy Note catch on is dying off. They’ve been replaced mostly by instalment plans that spread the entire cost of the phone out over several years or allow you to trade in your phone for the latest model at shorter intervals (the downside being that you never actually finish paying off your phone). Or, alternatively, you can buy phones for their full unlocked prices and do whatever you want with them, cellular compatibility permitting.

In short, more people are suddenly going to realise that their "£100" smartphone actually costs £500, and some companies are taking steps to ease that sticker shock independent of the carrier instalment plans. Apple is implementing its own instalment plan, demonstrating an enviable lack of dependence on the carriers.

Motorola has a "Motorola Credit Account" (currently in the US only) you can use to pay off the phone, but it is also cutting the unlocked prices of its phones to make them more appealing. Even more than past Motos X, the third-generation model brings the Moto G mindset to flagship phones. The company is offering the Moto X starting at £359, which at least a hundred pounds cheaper than most flagships (and sometimes even more, if we’re talking about other phones in the phablet size class).

On the other hand, Motorola isn’t Apple, and it doesn’t have the brick-and-mortar presence or mindshare to just toss off the carriers with no impact to the bottom line. The carriers didn’t exactly vault previous Motos X to the top of the sales charts, but they’ve got a lot of floor space, and many customers are still going to buy their phones through their carrier rather than bringing their own.

Among smartphone enthusiasts, Motorola’s model is going to do just fine. Buying custom phones directly through Moto Maker is a big part of the Moto X’s appeal anyway, and the phones are available at Best Buy and on Amazon for anyone who wants a quicker, simpler experience. Among regular people, well, we’ll see.